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The View | COP15: for China to achieve its ecological goals, SOEs must improve their biodiversity footprint
- Chinese state-owned enterprises dominate the dam construction industry and are behind some of the world’s largest mining deals
- Beijing must now take bold action to curb its ecological footprint overseas. SOEs themselves need to adopt clear policies that exclude harmful projects
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This week, China assumes the presidency of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty that has long served to coordinate global efforts to prevent biodiversity loss.
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Between now and next spring, Kunming hosts the convention’s Conference of Parties (COP15), where critical negotiations will determine whether the global community can arrest the biodiversity crisis that, unchecked, could leave half the world’s described species extinct by the end of the century.
Not on the agenda but an important subtext of the meetings is the biodiversity footprint of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and what steps they must take to fulfil the Chinese government’s calls for an “ecological civilisation”.
Kunming is the natural location for such an important event. It is the capital of Yunnan, a province representing just 4 per cent of China’s land area but more than 50 per cent of its biological species. Yunnan is also home to the Three Parallel Rivers, a Unesco World Heritage Site claimed as “the most biodiverse and least disturbed temperate ecosystems in the world”.
Kunming’s Nu River, one of mainland Asia’s last free-flowing rivers, has also been protected so far from planned hydropower dams through the efforts of environmentalist Dr Yu Xiaogang and others. Globally, just a third of the world’s longest rivers remain free-flowing and undammed.
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Indeed, the decision to shelve those plans in 2016 was a turning point in China’s dam-building spree, which had seen tens of thousands of dams erected on its rivers. For decades, China sacrificed its environment in return for unprecedented economic progress, and this has exacted a steep ecological cost. A 2015 WWF report found that almost half of China’s terrestrial vertebrate species had vanished in the past 40 years.
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